Best Russian Short Stories eBook

At three o’clock they had dinner. In the
evening they prepared the lessons together, and Olenka
wept with Sasha over the difficulties. When she
put him to bed, she lingered a long time making the
sign of the cross over him and muttering a prayer.
And when she lay in bed, she dreamed of the far-away,
misty future when Sasha would finish his studies and
become a doctor or an engineer, have a large house
of his own, with horses and a carriage, marry and
have children. She would fall asleep still thinking
of the same things, and tears would roll down her
cheeks from her closed eyes. And the black cat
would lie at her side purring: “Mrr, mrr,
mrr.”

Suddenly there was a loud knocking at the gate.
Olenka woke up breathless with fright, her heart beating
violently. Half a minute later there was another
knock.

“A telegram from Kharkov,” she thought,
her whole body in a tremble. “His mother
wants Sasha to come to her in Kharkov. Oh, great
God!”

She was in despair. Her head, her feet, her hands
turned cold. There was no unhappier creature
in the world, she felt. But another minute passed,
she heard voices. It was the veterinarian coming
home from the club.

“Thank God,” she thought. The load
gradually fell from her heart, she was at ease again.
And she went back to bed, thinking of Sasha who lay
fast asleep in the next room and sometimes cried out
in his sleep:

“I’ll give it to you! Get away!
Quit your scrapping!”

THE BET

BY ANTON P. CHEKHOV

I

It was a dark autumn night. The old banker was
pacing from corner to corner of his study, recalling
to his mind the party he gave in the autumn fifteen
years before. There were many clever people at
the party and much interesting conversation.
They talked among other things of capital punishment.
The guests, among them not a few scholars and journalists,
for the most part disapproved of capital punishment.
They found it obsolete as a means of punishment, unfitted
to a Christian State and immoral. Some of them
thought that capital punishment should be replaced
universally by life-imprisonment.

“I don’t agree with you,” said the
host. “I myself have experienced neither
capital punishment nor life-imprisonment, but if one
may judge a priori, then in my opinion capital
punishment is more moral and more humane than imprisonment.
Execution kills instantly, life-imprisonment kills
by degrees. Who is the more humane executioner,
one who kills you in a few seconds or one who draws
the life out of you incessantly, for years?”

“They’re both equally immoral,”
remarked one of the guests, “because their purpose
is the same, to take away life. The State is not
God. It has no right to take away that which
it cannot give back, if it should so desire.”

Among the company was a lawyer, a young man of about
twenty-five. On being asked his opinion, he said: